Tuesday, April 9, 2013

BloggeRhythms 4/9/2013

Margaret Thatcher's passing continues to remind me of her impact on the world, reinforcing my strong admiration for everything she stood for. Especially regarding the importance of personal responsibility and the destructiveness caused by socialism in any form.
 
Standing out most dramatically to me, is her proving that effective professional performance derives best from practical experience, supported by simple common sense as opposed to theory and hyperbole espoused by theoreticians, academicians and dilettantes having no substantive proof of even the slightest success.
 
In my particular case, those factors were not only relevant, they were the basis of my becoming a writer/author at all, which was at no time one of my goals until my retirement from “the real world.”
 
For the majority of my professional life I was involved in financial services sales. Over time I eventually headed the largest, most successful sales force our industry segment had ever seen, setting higher goals and standards virtually every month for years. No competitor, including the largest banks and financial institutions of all types even came close.
 
When I decided to retire from the day to day, my plan was to stay involved in the business as a sales trainer and consultant. That’s when I soon found out that in order to succeed I needed to attract the major entities in our field, because they were the ones most likely able to afford to pay my bills.
 
Within a very short time, I learned that those making decisions regarding the hiring of outside “experts” were more often in Human Relation's not only knowing nothing about their employer's operations, but totally unqualified to assess even the simplest aspects of what I had to offer. And, the larger the entity, the more likely I was to strike out because of the uneducated influence of HR clout.
 
Deciding to treat the situation as I would any business dilemma, I went back to square one, asking those un-interested in hiring me exactly what the problem was.
 
That’s when I found out that HR generally people felt safer hiring a published academician than someone who not only earned twenty times more than any of them, but also usually ate the lunches of those the theoretical windbags taught. Doing so every day in the street on a regular basis.
 
Now, although the practice of leaving something as important as the training of sales personnel, the lifeblood of any business in the world, to unqualified decision-makers is so inane it’s beyond preposterous –that’s exactly how it most often worked.
 
And thus, simply to please the bunch of ciphers who stood between me and success, I went to the American Management Association, told  them how much our industry needed a tome written by one who’d actually been in the trench and shortly authored my first written work, Selling Equipment Leasing. What’s more, once my book got my foot in the door, I actually taught my clients how to sell, which no academician ever did before.
 
So, here we have an actual example of the wrongfulness of pursuing theory over fact, compounded by blinding adherence to unattainable goals that sound the loftiest, yet cannot ever work in practice.
 
However, once someone like Margaret Thatcher gets her chance at bat, theory goes out the window to be replaced by solid fundamentals, hard work, dedication and facts. Which in England’s case not only brought it back from despair, but literally put it back on the map as a successful nation once more.
 
That’s it for today folks.
 
Adios

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